


Names

by pprfaith



Series: Vampire Character Studies [3]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon typical murder, Character Study, Dark, F/M, Gen, Introspection, Philosophy, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-01
Packaged: 2018-05-24 05:13:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6142588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damon wonders what his parents were thinking when they gave him his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Names

**Author's Note:**

> Another mostly-finished one from the unfinished folder. It has a few good lines.

+

Damon has always found is name ironic, has always wondered if his parents chose it for its meaning or simply the sound of it. 

He hopes for the latter. 

But then his mother always had this weird intuition, that sixth sense. 

Maybe she looked at him, the day he was born, and saw the mess he would become. Maybe she knew. 

Damon Salvatore.

Demon Saviour. 

Maybe she knew. 

+

 _For each man kills the thing he loves, yet each man does not die_.

Oscar Wilde. 

Damon met him once, shortly after the man was released from prison. He was sickly, smelling half dead already, but there was a magnetism about him that fascinated Damon. 

The way he saw things, so sharply angry and brutally honest, was entrancing. 

Damon thinks of the man, sometimes, when his hands itch to rip Elena’s tongue out, to gouge their mother’s eyes out of Stefan’s face. 

He thinks of Wilde and asks himself what happens when you die first. When you die and come back and start killing everything you’ve ever loved, because you know no other way to fill the hollow spaces. 

He doesn’t think he needs the answer. 

+

Paris, 1916.

“Would you like me to tell you your fortune, Monsieur?” a voice calls from a dark corner of the street. A gypsy girl sits there, swaddled in colourful blankets against the cold, smiling with kohl black eyes and sinful lips. 

“I know my fortune,” Damon retorts, makes to move on.

“That is arrogance, Monsieur,” she counters, teasingly. Just enough of an edge to draw people in, not enough to insult. She probably makes good coin, reading people’s palms on a street corner in January. 

“Well then,” Damon allows, despite himself. Pulls off one glove, presents his hand to her. 

She touches him, barely, and he feels something rush down his spine, right into the basest parts of him. Telling him to run. 

“Oh,” the girl gasps, pulling her hands back like she’s burnt. Her eyes are wide and he can feel her now, the power crackling on her skin. Witch. 

“Oh, Monsieur,” she whispers, stinking of pity. “You try so hard, but you can never….” She shakes her head. “Je suis désolé.”

He grins at her, boyish and bright. “You and me both, sweetheart,” he tells her, flicking a coin into her lap. “You and me both.”

+

For a decade or two, he reads the great philosophers. Descartes. Rousseau. Feuerbach, Bentham, Mill. 

Utilitarism, proof of god and self, social contracts. 

Anything and everything.

He looks for a definition of humanity in the yellowed pages, for a recipe for monster, god, soul. 

The good of the few, the good of the many, morality within social constructs. 

All he finds is more ways to hate himself.

+

He still dreams of her. 

That is the worst thing. 

After all these decades, after all she did, after all the loss and loneliness, he still dreams of her. 

Of Stefan, too. 

Of the two of them, playing catch in the fields behind the Salvatore land, out where no-one ever went. He is sitting on a blanket in the shade, watching his little brother chase their girl through the high grass, laughing. Happy. 

Katherine shrieks with glee as she evades Stefan, impossibly nimble despite her cumbersome dress, and spins herself sideways, toward Damon. She lands in his lap in a cloud of ruffles and silk, beaming up at him, her face open and happy in a way he now knows is a lie, but can’t help but love anyway. 

“Damon, my love,” she coos. “Won’t you join us?” 

Stefan comes skidding to a halt at the edge of the blanket, like an eager puppy. Damon reaches out, grabs his hand, hauls him down into the tangle of them. “Why don’t you two join me?” he asks as Stefan struggles to sit up, all elbows and no grace, complaining about Damon being mean. 

Katherine pats him on the head, grins. 

“Alright,” she says.

That’s when Damon wakes. 

+

Sometimes, he thinks Rose is his deepest doubts given voice, which is fucking ridiculous, and also way too accurate. 

She talks about the switch being a lie, about humanity, about memory and loneliness and about five centuries of existing without living and some small part of him keeps sobbing out, “Yes, yes, god, yes,” even while the rest of him fronts like a champ. 

“Bullshit,” he calls, time and again, and her blue eyes turn softer with pity each time. 

+

“God, Damon,” Stefan says from the doorway, 1945, 2010, 2134, always that same tone of voice, that defeated, deflated thing that makes Damon’s stomach churn with hatred and the need to kill.

Not his brother. Never that. 

But the girl who smiled at him at the checkout earlier, and the little boy who bumped into him in the parking lot. He wants to rip out their throats, pull their hearts from their chests and offer them up to Stefan, pass them to him with a bow and a smile. 

Wants to see if it would change anything about that goddamn, fucking condescending exasperation. 

Instead he downs the last of his drink, swings up into a sitting position and smirks. “Saint Stefan,” he greets. “How may I be of service?”

+

His mother named him demon, his father named him saviour and he’s stuck between the two, hating and hated, for centuries on end, loving the same faces over and over again, until he thinks he can’t anymore. 

Someone dies. 

Usually by his hand.

He starts over. 

His name is still Damon Salvatore.

That never changes. 

+


End file.
